Alternate title: Being Indie Doesn’t Mean You Have to Be a Stupid Business Person

XMU is my third favorite source for indie music behind WOXY (RIP) and NPR. I love the ever-changing music, the Download 15 and the endless interviews with great indie bands. I was listening to an interview with a member of the band Mountain Goats this afternoon. I assume it was John Darnielle promoting their recently released “All Eternals Deck”, which you can get for $5 right now (sorry if the deal expired when you read this) on AMZN. I got ripped off by iTunes. I caught the end of the interview, so if it wasn’t Darnielle, I apologize and will correct the post, but I’m going to refer to the speaker as Darnielle because he is the leader of the band and would probably make the kinds of strong statements that I am going to talk about…

Cliche Tired

Darnielle started disparaging twitter, Facebook and tumblr specifically as mediums to release an album. He was attacking marketing. He talked about how using channels that businesses have discovered is tired. He generalized about how businesses do not understand how to use the mediums, manning their accounts with people who only exist to ask people to buy products. He encouraged artists to considered bolting from the channels simply because businesses are on them and that they are becoming another avenue for advertising. Seriously? Testing into new channels constantly is very indie and smart, but leaving them just because others see the value is cliche indie behavior and it is backwards and it has already been done by the likes of Trent Reznor and Edward Droste of Grizzly Bear, the latter of which was using twitter brilliantly and left suddenly and unexpectedly.

Artists: Darnielle’s behavior is so indie cliche.

And he is dead wrong.

The thing that Darnielle is failing to remember is that not only does everyone in social media have a unique presence, but that everyone has a unique experience. We do not all follow the same people and we do not all see/hear/touch/taste/digest the same messages. Mountain Goats have been on twitter since August 21, 2009. They have spent 590 days amassing followers who are interested in creative random thoughts, interactions and their music. And by the way they have been building trust to the point where OF COURSE they can ask their followers to buy their new CD, which they do in this very tweet:

Success is OK

Being indie does not have to mean being a stupid business person. And thinking about how you are going to monetize your music does not mean you are not indie. All it means is that you do not make compromises with your music, style, ideals to get where you want to go. It does not mean you have to throw everything away. It means you need to have a plan and stick to your guns without whoring yourself out to everyone who would throw a dollar at you. Do not throw something away just because some people you do not like get into it. Reinvent it. Keep leading. Keep doing it better.

Guess what? If you do things right and if you are good, at some point the mainstream finds out about you and starts to like you and starts to buy your stuff. What are you going to do? Give the money back? Of course you will not. You will buy some new clothes and equipment that you have been dreaming about. You will schedule a larger tour, make a new album and you will give some money to causes you care about.

In other words, you will succeed, but you will do it on your terms.

PS: File this post under tough love (and buy the album).
PPS: Mountain Goats +10 epic geek points for MtG reference in their album title!

Everyone has been talking about the new phenomenon of group texting brought about by technologies like GroupMe, Beluga, Fast Society and even (haha) BrightKite. And if Social Fresh Tampa was any indication, everyone is going to be using these new spin-up, disposable communities to communicate instead of DMing on twitter. This stuff spreads like wildfire. Within minutes of telling one person, 10 people were meeping me.

It is a great way to simultaneously communicate with a small group of people who need to be “in the know”, but what are we really going to call it “group texting”? No. We are markters and tech nerds. We need to have something better. Enter David Armano who accidentally came up with the solution.

David said he was “Groupmeeping”. That’s a little too specific to GroupMe, but since they seem to be an early favorite, perhaps we can shorten that term to “meep”.

meep: /meep/ n. origin: Nerdese / Armanoism 1. a text to a group of people.

meep: /meep/ v. origin: Nerdese / Armanoism 1. the act of sending a group text.

I meep
You meep
We meep
She/He meeps
We all meep
You all meep
They meep

Meep you at SXSW?

We talk a lot about the power of using data to make smart recommendations. Many companies are building technology to set up the payoff if and when a critical mass of people integrate their application into their lifestyle. WHERE is a company that is focused on data first. WHERE does a lot of things. Bringing on customer experience guru Nataly Kogan has changed the flow of the application, ease of use and social content for the better. Now we have a collision of preference data, good user experience, innovators, data scientists and visualizers (like Mok Oh) that is not afraid to take that next step. (to be fair Walt, Dan Gilmartin, David Chang, Jim Caralis, Chris Bernardi, Erin O, Katy Daddaria and a load of others are pretty amazing too)

Try this

Download WHERE for iPhone or Droid [incidentally, I thought this would be fun for the 2 of you who like QR codes]. Ask a nearby friend to do that same.

Search for your favorite restaurants anywhere. If you need to change the location, use the change button on the bottom. Add restaurants that you love to your favorites list and ones you want to try to want to go.

Now go back to the home screen and click the Magic 8 Ball to have it make a suggestion for a place for you to eat.

Now, go to a friend and Bump phones using WHERE.

It will create an intersect of your preferences to find a place that suits you both. Awesome, right?

Let me know how it worked for you and be sure to check out my WHERE SXSW guide too.

Today my friend Uwe Hook told me that the future of location-based marketing was here and that I should give it a try. I am frequent user of a lot of apps, many of which are location-based and new apps come out every day and it takes a lot for me to get really excited about the possibilities. Many LBS are similar, based on check-ins and they give you options about what you do after the check-in.

But what about before the check-in? So far, the only “intent” based application that has stuck with me is Plancast. I agree with the vision of CEO Mark Hendrickson and I think there is a lot Plancast can do to offer companies a chance to improve the experience for his user base if he eliminates the RSVP-for-everything problem and finds a way to integrate with an LBS app like foursquare so that he can check to see the show-no-show rate at events that are plancasted.

Enter Ditto. Capturing someone at a decision point is the purpose of Ditto. In other words, you use Ditto to announce what you are going to do. Jyri Englestrom, founder of the twitter competitor that was sucked up by Google called < a href=”http://www.jaiku.com”>Jaiku. Currently it lets you intend to be:

• At Home
• Working
• Eat
• See Movie
• Coffee
• In Transit
• Go Out
• Event
• With Kids
• Exercise
• Shopping
• Chat

You can intend to do these things at particular locations and you can send your intention to twitter, Facebook and even a check-in to foursquare. Most of the activities let you peel back the onion to add a deeper level of categorization. For instance, look at Home, you can categorize yourself cooking, gardening, online, music, cleaning (see below). Wait, what? Who is going to announce their intent to do these things at home. I think what we are seeing here is a more semantic version of twitter (or jaiku). Instead of clumsy hashtags for categorization, we can overtly and easily click on categories to classify specifically what we are doing. This makes analysis of activities a whole lot easier than searching pure, unstructured data or making sense of (useless) hashtags in twitter. I pinged Dennis Crowley, CEO of foursquare to get his take as I think we were both monkeying around with Ditto about the same time. I think he said it best:

I think that unless Ditto finds a way to get marketers or advertisers to use the purchase intent case to give people incentives to buy, people probably will not use the tool as it was intended. So while Ditto may not end up being used for what the founders intended it to be used for, it could inspire a new way to chat and I can certainly picture some beautiful data visualizations based on how we are using Ditto to communicate. I plan to give Ditto a really detailed look. I like it and I think you will too. Scan this QR code on your iPhone to get it fast and make sure you come back here to tell me what you think.

allen & gerritsen’s new show Tech Interruption debuts at SXSW.

The idea

Last year at SXSW, the social media “elite” complained that the content was not there. Of course that was nonsense. The people complaining did not go to the panels, talks or keynotes for the most part. The ones that did go only went to their friends’ panels. People like Burr Settles, Margot Bloomstein, Gregory Ng and Chris Messina absolutely knocked the cover off of the ball last year. They inspired everyone who came to see them and they validated the existence of SXSW as a cutting edge technology conference.

In response to the comments, I submitted a “Panel About Nothing (You Don’t Care About)”. The panel was designed to

• solve the phantom problem exposed by the social media elite
• eliminate the need to look into a crystal ball and decide what would be relevant months in advance of a panel
• create a panel that the audience in attendance would care about
• provoke conversation about and inform people about the important technology events of the day

The panel, in spite of having the commitment of CC Chapman, Jay Cuthrel and Jenn Van Grove was a victim of the very method that would supply the content to the panel: crowdsourcing. The allen & gerritsen team took the idea and changed it from a panel to a show. We pitched it to a megasponsor and will debut Tech Interruption at SXSW at the PepsiCo stage. Thank you PepsiCo! The show will run daily at approximately 5:30PM and we have some amazing guests and co-hosts lined up.

We need you

Let’s cut to the chase. We are looking for great tech to talk about, but we are also listening. When you have something you want us to talk about, tweet it to the hashtag #techi. We will look at the tweets and we will try to get your topic onto the show Old Spice style.

During and after the show, tweet your thoughts on the points we make during the show to the same hashtag, #techi. We will respond to you and we hope you will also respond to others in the conversation.

Come see us at the PepsiCo Stage at 5:30 daily during SXSW interactive and keep watching for an announcement about when we will be shooting the show on a weekly basis. If you would like to be a guest on the show, please send an email to schneidermike at a dash g dot com. Also watch techinterruption.com for the site to go live any day now!

A quick rant on making foursquare analytics useful for a brand. Read from bottom to top.

According to a Forrester of study US Online adults, only 4% have ever used location based applications. The report has some very interesting data [although the definition of Location Based Social Networks is mired in ambiguity. Content based location networks like Yelp and Where seem to be excluded.]. The predominantly male audience is talked about as an influencer, but also as a “drop in the bucket” compared to the effectiveness of the audience that interacts with SMS, mobile search and display media on WAP sites.

Two things bother me. First, Forrester is late to the party and just knocked over my lamp and let my out my cat. Second is the recommendation in the report called Location Based Social Networks Show a Hint of Mobile Engagement, which you can buy here.

“Forrester recommends that bold, male-targeted marketers start testing but that most marketers should wait until they can get a bigger bang for their buck, when adoption rates increase and established players emerge from the fray.”

– quoted from the report abstract.

Conversations and Engagement, Not Impressions and CTR

Since when is social media all about impressions? As someone who constantly encourages clients and prospects to think about the quality of their social media audience before the quantity, I find this recommendation to be rooted in paid media type thinking. This is earned media. We need to switch lenses and look at the audience again.

A Smaller, Yet More Engaged Audience of Influencers

The good news is that while the audience is small compare to Facebook users or Google users, it is growing very rapidly. This audience is also willing to activate. We know that they will fill their social graphs with checkins, offers, badges and other surprises. Their mean household income is $25,500 more than the average US online household, so in theory they have more spending power (assuming they are not concentrated in higher cost of living areas). They rely on their phones for information. They are 24% more likely to look to their phone before they make a purchase, 24% more likely to want to receive a relevant (text) message from a business, 23% more likely to use their phone to participate in a sweepstakes or contest and 22% more likely to text for a coupon or discount. In other words, these people are a marketer’s dream.

This is cutting edge stuff with a ton of potential. We have only seen small pockets of fully integrated campaigns (like USA Today) that uses paid media to drive people to a LBS app to spurn adoption and engage with the brand. Most of the growth is organic, through PR and events. It is still very new stuff and the fact that there are so many large and small vendors in the space is a detriment to more widespread adoption because there is still no de facto standard for checkins, although I think Foursquare has a shot at being it if they keep up their pace and continue to innovate and appeal to and keep the interest of people who are always hungry for more.

I understand that Forrester is a group of analysts and that they need to use their data to make what they feel is the best recommendation for their clientele, but given how smart they are, I would think there would be some suggestions on how to further the industry in the report. They themselves begin the article by calling the industry “nascent”, which is a perfect word, but what about loyalty (their example is Starbucks and a “startup LBSN”, what?)? White labeling opportunities? Contextual recommendations? Usefulness of checkin data? Where’s the future?

The thinking of these platforms is very “What’s next?”. Forrester’s, in this instance, “What’s now?”. My recommendation is to test into these platforms, collect and analyze data on your influencers and engage heavily with those who are engaging with you.

I used to do a lot of development, data warehouse and business intelligence work for a pharmaceuticals giant. During this time I learned a great deal about clinical trials, supply chain, HIPA, good development process, business intelligence and most importantly – the value of a day.

A Pharmaceuticals Analogy

For those of you who have never given big pharma much thought, consider that each time a company discovers a compound that they think will be useful to treat something, the clock starts ticking. In a nutshell, they need to patent the compound before anyone else does, run clinical trials to ensure that the compound will not kill anyone, document the effectiveness and the side effects, run results and literally truckloads of paperwork through the FDA, get the paperwork reviewed and approved and then they can market the drug. [Pharmaceuticals pros know that it is far more complicated than my summary!]

The problem is that patents on the compounds are not infinite and the company needs to get their meds into play for as long as possible before their exclusivity runs out and the generics come in with cheaper versions of the same thing. Insurance companies like to pay the cut rates for the generics. Therefore, a single day can cost a pharma company millions of dollars. This is why the industry is so cutthroat, fast paced and on edge.

I am looking at location based similarly from a “cost of a day” perspective. Foursquare and Gowalla and to a lesser exent Whrrl have enormous potential and also a set of hard problems. Dennis Crowley is on the cover of every magazine and out speaking everywhere to promote the product and that is working. I am not criticizing this nor do I want to spoil his amazing ride,* I just want to remind him and his counterparts of an ever looming threat.

The Giant is Going to Awaken

Facebook has been talking about getting into the location game soon. I thought it would happen at SXSW and I was wrong. It probably would have happened at D8 except that Mark Zuckerberg and company are a tad distracted right now by issues of privacy. I think that Crowley and fellow location based rock star, Josh Williams need to look at this as a stay of execution.

• Facebook has somewhere between 400 and 500 million active users.
• All other LBS combined have around 1/100th of Facebook’s user base
• Facebook has penetrated the main stream who largely still is either scared of or has no idea what a Gosquare is
• We do not have a clear picture of all of the services available on Foursquare, Gowalla, Whrrl, Brightkite, etc.
• Automation of services / self serve models do not yet exist or are as slow as molasses
• Business development teams are spread quite thin
• Case studies with ROI are few and far between

What’s going to happen

Here’s what I see happening. Facebook is going to get through this privacy thing. National Quit Facebook Day was a bust because people have no place else like Facebook to go. They have already made privacy easier to manage and now people seem to get that their data is not their own. Blogs like this one have documented what people are asking for in a Facebook alternative and identified the fact that they are going to have to pay for the bandwidth. Rumblings of Facebook entering the location game have been going on for months. Their developers are working on it as we speak and I would bet it is ready to roll out within hours of Zuckerberg saying “Go!” (pending Apple allowing an application update).

I am sure that Facebook will have all of the features that we like about LBS. They will probably have check ins and specials that are activated by check ins or by loyalty. They will probably have something like a scavenger hunt that unlocks a prize. They will have an element of randomness with their PCP (post checkin page) where you can unlock achievements (badges / pins) or win prizes. (I am supposing all the aforementioned. Do not treat as fact.)

The Top Priority

The thing that the big 3 need to solve before Facebook gets into the game is ease of activation. They need to clearly state how to validate that a location belongs to the business owner and make this a speedy process. They need to tell marketers and brands exactly how to activate. We need to know what are the exact services they provide, what is the lead time and how much they cost. And they need to do this soon because there is really only two good, clean business case on LBS right now, by AJ Vaynerchuk and company at Vaynermedia and another by the Fleishman Hilliard team for Cheverolet.

Facebook will treat this like a revenue stream. Their LBS version 1 will go online with a method of business activation, tiered levels of service and a pricing model. They have the benefit of seeing where Gowalla and Foursquare are succeeding and where they are failing, plus they have the mainstream users on their site who do not need to be convinced to use a new app and build up a new social graph, rather they can just use the one they already have.

There goes the neighborhood

With Facebook on the scene, the openness of data is compromised. The current tools are reasonably open via the API or at least via data providers like SimpleGeo. Facebook’s data is harder to aggregate and will be less accessible. Facebook will be the ones enjoying an increased ability to target their user base and marketers will benefit because they will be able to take advantage of this new data stream as long as they want to use Facebook to do so.

So move quick Big 3! Fix your funnel. Make it clear how to activate. The value of a day for you, like big pharma, is extraordinary.

*I like Crowley. He’s dynamic, smart, confident, funny and a good sport. He has never given me shit for coining the #failsquare hashtag and he is fantastic at answering the hard questions in a public forum.

I am using Foodspotting and I am loving it. I have been food spotting forever and did not know I was actually Foodspotting. More on Foodspotting later, I have a bigger post planned, but I came across an interesting use case to pour out to Alexa and her team.

So I mentioned that I have been food spotting for some time. This means I have a back log of pictures that I want to post and tag in the tool. Some of these are not close to my “current location”. Foodspotting’s iPhone app asks to know where I am and assumes that any food that I am tagging is food that I have just encountered. Well, the food that I want to spot is from Kirkland, WA. So I go to the map.

The blue dot indicates that I am in Boston, so I drag the map over to Seattle.

I then make sure my filters are set to spot foods in the area

then I scan the area for foods to let it know where I am?

AWESOME! I found the absolute best coffee shop on the planet, Zoka Coffee. So now I want to spot something. I want to add a fruit salad to the Trellis Restaurant in Kirkland. I setup my shot. (Isn’t it beautiful? That fruit salad was amazing)

And now to tag it with a location.

Oops. The blue dot is in Watertown, MA so I must be there too. Is there a way to do what I want to do which is to add stuff to the database that is not near me? I get why you are doing it the way you are, so that people don’t add a dead woodpecker to some restaurant in Omaha when they are in Boston.

obviously that’s photoshop

I caught this article on Mark Zuckerberg’s privacy settings via Julia Roy. And while Zuckerberg may be both cavalier and pompous, so is the community. Look at their sense of entitlement. Please let this serve as a friendly reminder: Facebook is free.

Facebook is Free

The community is complaining about free software, free software that is doing what it says it is going to do. Facebook tells you that they can use your persona to target you and that developers can use it to build applications to serve you. That’s the point. That is how they make money. And let me remind you again, you have not paid a dime for Facebook. The terms of use clearly outline the default privacy. Yes, they change them a lot without asking -WHICH IS TOTALLY SLIMY- but they are pretty good about telling you they changed them. It really is your responsibility to read what you’ve accepted and you do not until someone who has posts something on your wall telling you what they have read. And If you think what they are doing is sleazy, then leave, but first you may want to consider what you would be leaving for.

Do People Want a Facebook Alternative?

Maybe. People say they want more control of their data, but I am not convinced that even Diaspora, the open source, privacy aware, alleged Facebook killer is what people are asking for. This is just based on their video, but it sounds like it is just another version of Facebook, except more righteous and secure.

Ilya from Diaspora says: “No longer will you be at the whims of these large corporate networks who want to tell you that sharing and privacy are mutually exclusive because it will be your node.” Someone has to pay for that. What’s the catch? There’s only $175,121 in kickstarter donations to date thus far. When it collapses under the weight of a lack of revenue model, people will be running back to their free Facebook accounts.

Here is what I think the screaming community means to ask for:

A write once, use anywhere (portable) “digital locker” that carries standard profile information, your content, your locations, your connections and your fully customizable security policy.

There are a host of problems that need to be solved. First major problem is that a W3C-like standard needs to be implemented for the digital locker class and the associated API. Developers need to have something to develop against and a standard convention will make it easy for new developers to understand the possibilities while existing applications bring themselves up to speed.

Money and attention seem to have opened the eyes of Diaspora even wider because they have, according to their blog, decided to implement some new standards like OStatus. But it’s probably just scratching the surface of what they really need to do.

The biggest problem here is that the complainers will need to manage their own security models. There will be default models that can be chosen to pass to any application that you sign up for, but I would bet most people won’t take the time to create and manage security on an application by application basis. It’s not easy.

Also, somebody has to pay for the space you are using. Will it be you?

• Are you willing to leave Facebook for a pay option?
• What has Facebook done to violate the Terms of Use?
• Are you willing to spend the time managing security policies between apps and other people’s digital lockers in your own digital locker?